10 Websites That Changed My Life

...out of this world.

As people who know me well know well, I'm a fan of celebrating random milestones, such as my 150 Mercury-year birthday (coming this November, folks!), so naturally, I wanted to do something to mark my 5000th tweet since joining the great Twitter revolution back in 2009.

In honour of the occasion, I decided to do a little 11-tweet microblog of 10 websites that have been particularly important to me over my many years of internettery (which goes right back to the walled-garden days of CompuServe, and even a little Prestel before that).

That's all well and good, but 140 characters doesn't really give me room to expand on why each of the sites is/was important to me. Have they really "changed my life" as the title above claims? Well, insofar as there would be slight differences to my past or present life without them, yes.

I'm not a blogger - there's not enough time in my ever-so-important and busy life to be writing down all my thoughts for nobody to read - so I created this blog solely for this purpose... for nobody to read.

I'm not going to spend much time trying to make this post look pretty. Maybe some day I'll get more into blogging and taking more pride, at which point I'll probably delete this embarrassing old post. Or at least give it a makeover.

Anyway, without further delay, here are the 10 sites I tweeted about, from the extremely well-known to the utterly geeky, and in no particular order:

1. Ian's Shoelace Site 

You've known how to tie your shoelaces since you were knee-high to a primary school teacher, right? Well think again. This site provides a multitude of ways to tie and lace your shoes for various purposes, and will also help you avoid the dreaded "Granny Knot".

The "Ian Knot" has saved me vital seconds every day, and the secure version has (probably) saved me from many a lace-tripping serious injury on the football pitch.

My gratitude knows no bounds.


2. XDA-Developers

Never bent in my pocket.

There was a girl I met at university who was terribly annoyed by how popular and ubiquitous The Verve had become, because she "loved them before anybody else had even heard of them".


In a similarly pretentious fashion, I was using smartphones when androids were only seen in sci-fi and iPhones weren't even a glint in Mr Jobs' eye. Symbian and Windows CE didn't have app stores, so the best way to make the most of the devices was to tap in to the community of techy geeks writing and sharing mobile programs in their own time.

The place for this community to get together was XDA-Developers (named after the popular O2 devices of the time). Solutions to problems, tips and tweaks, accessory advice and more could be found here. And still can today.

Continuing the tech theme....

3. Tek-tips/Stack Overflow

Blonde, brunette, redhead.

As a developer, any amount of training or book-reading can only give you a general understanding of your chosen environment. In practice, there are all sorts of tricky problems to solve and unfathomable error messages to decipher (especially if Microsoft have got anything to do with it!).

Thankfully, helpful experts can be found online, seemingly ready and willing to help out from the kindness of their hearts.

I'm cheating a bit including two websites here. I could actually list a whole host of similar forums and message boards, but Tek-Tips was always my first port of call in my early vba/Access days, and more recently Stack Overflow has emerged as the most likely search result to yield the answer I seek.

Ultimately, of course, all my work is entirely my own!...


Moving away from the obscure and niche for the next few:

4. Wikipedia

M was heavy.

When I was growing up, we had a whole long bookshelf devoted to our encyclopaedia set. It was a great source of information for homework and projects, and there were even annual update books providing new articles in an attempt to keep the set from becoming too outdated.

Eventually, we got a copy of Microsoft's Encarta on CD-ROM which, while not as comprehensive as the books, gave a tantalising introduction to the advantages of multimedia, with videos and audio clips supplementing the words and pictures.

Now, we are all spoilt by the wealth of information on pretty much any topic you can imagine provided by the contributors to Wikipedia. Sure, there are some reliability issues associated with its open-access policy, but on the whole, the review and discussion system works well, and it's forever being expanded and updated. All in all, pretty amazing.

5. BBC

The British Bathroom Centre, Holloway Road

I'm sympathetic with some of the arguments against the licence fee. But the BBC's online news, sport and weather pages are on most people's bookmarks menu for a good reason, even if their news isn't as impartial as I would like sometimes.

Their TV and Radio content can also be included here, since it can all be accessed via iPlayer, and the podcasts of their comedy, science and F1 radio programmes make up a large proportion of my commuter-listening (and are thankfully free of the repetitive adverts that plague the other 'casts I subscribe to!) 


6. Google Maps

Me hearty.

For me, online mapping started with Multimap. Or was it Streetmap? The former was eventually swallowed up by Bing, and the latter, amazingly, is still going strong. Well, "strong" is probably a bit... um, strong. Despite them offering some quality maps from the likes of OS and Collins Bartholomew, I can't remember the last time I visited other than to check whether it still existed.

These days, it's all about Google. Simple interface, good maps, satellite images and, of course, Street View. I could happily spend a whole evening just virtually travelling the world, checking out places I've been, place's I'd like to go and places I'll never go. Street View is also very useful for checking out the parking restrictions in London's multitude of CPZs.
7. Twitter

Tweet, to who?

Twitter is stupid. It's just a load of people talking about their boring little lives, voicing their idiotic opinions and posting pictures of their dinner.

Yeah, there's a lot of that, but there's a lot of good stuff too, and it's totally up to you how you use it. Comedy, politics, celebrity, sport, news, art, marketing and plenty of idiots. It's all there and more. Take from it what you want and give back what you please. Twitter is the new internet. Except it's not that new. Whatever. I like it. 8. AutoHotKey

It's a real word in scrabble, honest!

I'm cheating again. AHK isn't really a website. But it does have one. In fact it has two. And it's on the list, so that's that.

Ok, so what the hell is it, and why am I bending the rules to include it here? It's just a little automation program with its own little programming language, which is quite easy to learn if you're that way inclined. Big whoop.

Want holding-down-the-left-mouse-button-while-clicking-the-right-one to filter a table based on the contents of the clipboard? Or Ctrl+Win+Alt+V to paste a file path, replacing drive letters with the UNC? Or Win+Alt+L to lock the computer and also update your timesheet because you're going for lunch? Probably not, but these are a small sample of little scripts I use which make my life ever-so-slightly easier and give me a smug little grin when I use them.

Unlike Twitter, it doesn't have mass appeal. But like Twitter, it's extremely versatile once you start exploring a bit.


9. How Stuff Works / Stuff You Should Know

Knob

When I was ickle, so I am told, I had a habit of dismantling display items in white goods shops. I just wanted to know how they worked.

Years later, some Brainy guy called Marshall in the USA heard of my fascination and decided to make a website for me. I think other people were allowed to use it too. It was (and still is) called How Stuff Works, and it's full of information on.... you guessed it.

Some parts of the above story may not be completely true.

Since 2008, they have produced a twice-weekly podcast called Stuff You Should Know, in which they pick a topic (usually from the articles on the parent site), and expand on it. It's can be quite US-centric sometimes, but I've learned about all sorts of things, including shrunken heads, pinball machines, the Rosetta Stone and, unfortunately, how I can buy and print real US postage stamps from the comfort of my own home... irritatingly irrelevant (to me) adverts! 

10. xkcd

A classic.

A silly, geeky (often nerdy), web comic with simple stick figures but sometimes painstakingly compiled stats-based drawings.

There's also a good spin-off series called What If?

I like it. My brother often doesn't get it. Which makes me like it more (even if I sometimes don't get it either).





Honourable mention: Snopes

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